


Catch and Release

by snackbaskets



Series: The Robin Protocol [1]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Also as always, Autistic Bruce Wayne, Bat Family, Batfamily Feels, Batfamily Shenanigans, Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Dick Grayson is Robin, Family, Family Fluff, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Gen, Parent-Child Relationship, Protective Bruce Wayne, Romani Dick Grayson, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Young Dick Grayson, as always lads, daddy!Bats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 13:15:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19724404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snackbaskets/pseuds/snackbaskets
Summary: There's a tradition among the family: when in danger, you grab the smallest Robin and hang on tight. But like all traditions, this one had to start somewhere, right?Alternately: three times Dick bodily attacks his father (with love)





	Catch and Release

**Author's Note:**

> HEY LADS.. IM BACK
> 
> i wanted 2 do this lil series of batfam things since i started writing for dc stuff but ive been antsy about starting anythign big (considering my track record for abandoning things lmao) so these r just gonna b some interconnected drabbles of the family protecting each other bc... i.. lov them..

“Listen closely, Dick. If you ever encounter an explosive device when we’re out on patrol, you come to me immediately. The material of my cape and my greater mass will distribute force and heat away from you, and make you less likely to suffer concussive injuries or burns.”

“You’ll catch me?”

“I’ll shield you from the blast, yes, for the sake of your safe--”

“But you’ll catch me if I jump at you, right, B?”

“...Yes, Dick. I will catch you.”

“Okay!” Dick cried, and threw himself into Bruce’s arms. 

-

For all he liked breaking and bending the rules, Dick was very fond of flinging himself at Bruce at any given moment. It was the one rule he used liberally: to hide in his guardian’s embrace if in danger. Or in distress. Or delight. Or in the kitchen. Bruce was becoming very well versed in the art of catching nine-year olds in flight. 

Alfred insisted it was a good thing, that it meant Dick felt safe with him, that Bruce’s hold made him feel wanted and protected, as intended. 

“I simply don’t understand why he insists on using the maneuver outside of combat,” he mused.

“Perhaps, sir, it is because he’s an affectionate young soul, and is, in fact, a nine year old boy in need of attention.”

“Surely I wasn’t so… touchy, as a child?”

“I say so lovingly, Master Bruce, but you were a fairly abnormal child.”

“Hn.”

“Quite.”

-

Bruce politely ignored the buxom woman currently trying to abduct his arm into her breasts and sipped his champagne, making idle conversation he cared little about and absently watching Dick charm a gaggle of rich old ladies on the other side of the room. 

“He’s such a sweet thing,” Mrs. Fordst sighed, and her husband nodded, happily running his fingers over her knuckles in a rare display of a functional relationship in Gotham’s upper crust. “He’ll have every young lady wrapped around his finger in a few years, Brucie, just like his father. You’d best enjoy the time you have now, darling, before he makes your life a holy terror.” She tipped her head back and laughed, and the circle of socialites joined her. The model on Bruce’s arm continued attempting to reverse the process of cellular mitosis. 

“How do you mean?” he asked, genuinely curious. The Fordsts had a gaggle of children, and were far more knowledgeable on rearing them than he was. Seeking information from them would be beneficial. 

“I forget you’re a first time father.” Mrs. Fordst looked over at her husband and sighed, leaning her head on his shoulder. “Once they get to a certain age, your children decide they’ve had more than enough of being doted on, and just like that, you’ll hardly get a chance to hold them again. The boys, especially, the poor things. I know it’s bound to happen, but it breaks my heart every time.”

Bruce tried to imagine a world in which Dick Grayson didn’t glue himself to every person who even tangentially considered allowing it, and frowned. 

“You’ve encountered this with _all_ of your children?”

“At some point or another. Like I said, the girls don’t shy away so badly, and the boys will allow a little more love from their mother, but poor James, here…”

“I damn near have to wrestle the boys to get a hug, these days,” he said wistfully. “Richard’s getting about that age, I think. You’d best smother him while you can.”

“...I see. I’ll. Do that, then.”

“It’s always scariest with the firstborn, dear. You’ll feel much less clueless with the second.”

“By the time you get to the third, you’ve seen just about everything. Makes a man of steel!” 

Bruce flashed a press smile. He was perfectly content with just Dick to worry about. He didn’t see a second child in the future, God forbid a _third_.

“I should fetch him, anyhow. It’s getting late.”

He carefully peeled himself away from the model-- Violetta, her name was-- and shook hands with the circle he’d amassed, kissing cheeks and patting shoulders and exchanging ‘old sports’ with a smile as vacant as Brucie Wayne’s massive head. 

“Dick,” he called, absently smoothing his suit. “You have school tomorrow, so we should be go--”

The pound of tiny feet was his only warning before finding himself with an armful of Armani size XXXS, a pair of reedy little arms wrapped around his neck and his mouth full of fluffy black hair that, at one point, had been slicked back into a brief semblance of order. 

“Oh, how precious!” someone cried, as Bruce awkwardly fumbled Dick onto his hip. The boy didn’t seem to mind being manhandled like an unruly kitten, smiling and settling his head on Bruce’s shoulder with a bright-eyed grin and bubbly laugh that had everyone in the immediate vicinity cooing. 

_You should behave yourself better at functions like these,_ Bruce almost said, but the Fordsts were looking at Dick with something achingly wistful in their eyes, and the League had grown rather fond of having a limpet, and a world without Dick Grayson making it his mission to hug everyone he possibly could was unimaginable, so instead Bruce just patted the boy’s back like he’d seen the fathers at the park do. 

“Goodnight, everyone,” he said, and received a few amused ‘good night’s in return.

“Have a nice evening!” Dick added, and received a cacophony of ‘you too’s from nearly every other person in the room.

-

Diana methodically sewed up the gash over his shoulderblade as Bruce watched the other heroes mill around them, pulling off masks and ruffling sweat-soaked hair and stumbling towards the showers to nurse their sore muscles and budding bruises. Dick sat on the table across the room from him, chattering at Clark in his Superman t-shirt and scuffed tennis shoes that had been new and white a week ago.

“He’s growing up so fast,” Diana mused.

“Hn.” he replied.

“He’s a teenager now, isn’t he? I’ve heard that the boys of man’s world become quite a handful at his age. What has he been like?”

“He’s a lot like he’s always been, Diana.”

“Nothing has changed, then?”

“Nothing beyond the average and expected developmental changes, no.”

Hal walked up to where Clark and Dick were sitting and scrubbed his knuckles over Dick’s head, and the boy weathered it only for a moment before hooking his ankles behind the Lantern's knee and flipping him onto the floor. Barry appeared fast enough to keep him from completely eating the concrete, but was nearly in tears laughing by the time Hal registered what had happened. He passed Dick a bill. Clark made a face that implied he was being scolded for paying off teenage sidekicks. Bruce watched Dick quietly slip the bill into Clark’s pocket. 

“He has a wonderful heart.”

“Hn.”

“You’ve raised him very well.”

“The heart is all him.”

“So you say.”

Diana finished strapping down gauze over the stitches, and helped Bruce shrug back into the Batsuit. He’d clean up back at the Manor. Dick had homework to do, and he definitely hadn’t done it while he’d been keeping an ear on the comms at the Watchtower.

“Dick,” Bruce grunted as he stood, readjusting his gauntlets.

He wasn’t even all that surprised when he found himself facing down a sprinting acrobat, this time, and he hardly even fumbled when Dick launched himself up to wrap his arms around Bruce’s neck, instead hooking his good arm around the back of Dick’s legs and letting him support himself for the most part as Bruce marched down to the zeta tubes. Wally was taking pictures, if the peace sign being flashed over his shoulder were any indication. He didn’t really care. At least Dick was talking to him again, and even more so, was willing to bed down at the Manor instead of Titans Tower for a few days. He’d take what he could get. 

-

“You know, Firefly, I really thought we hashed this one out, already.”

Dick flipped over a jet of fire, Nightwing blue bright against the red-orange haze that painted the warehouse and smothered the moonlight that bled through the windows.

“You know, from the last time we put you in Blackgate? And the time before that, and the time before that-- oh! And, you know, the time before that!”

“Shut _up_!” Firefly roared, and spewed more flame across the warehouse, glass panes shattering under the heat and smoke sitting like water between the ceiling beams. Dick sprang off Firefly’s shoulders and struck his abdomen with one of his escrimas, and the second of startled spasming gave Bruce enough time to get up close and slam his fist against the villain’s jaw, punching him a one-way ticket to a good night’s rest and an all expenses paid trip back to Blackgate. 

“They really never learn, huh, B?” Dick said, looping one of Firefly’s arms over his shoulders as they dragged him out of the warehouse, beams dropping from the roof in clouds of embers and heat and _too close_.

“Talk less, focus more.”

“Come _on_. We were fine, _I_ was fine. You know it.”

“And if you’d been thirty seconds slower, you may not have been.”

“Thirty seconds is a long time!”

“Not long enough. Do better.”

“Nag, nag, nag.”

Bruce shouldered a little more of Firefly’s weight, urging them to move faster from the burn. Between them, Firefly groaned.

“You really should have considered that before he started lighting things on fire, buddy.”

“Ghh….”

“Didn’t catch that one.”

“...Gotcha.”

Bruce had his hand fisted in the back of Firefly’s suit before the word had fully passed his lips, wrenching him off Dick’s shoulders and hurling him, cackling, into a pile of crates stacked up on the pier. (Maybe a little more forcefully than was strictly necessary, but pyrotechnics had become something of a sore spot in the family, and he didn’t feel like breaking a few extra bones was _too_ morally inappropriate.) Firefly went down in a flail of limbs and packing peanuts at about the same time the first charge went off in the burning warehouse, spraying debris and chemical-heavy fire out the busted-open windows and into the water. 

“How many blocks of C-4 does it take to get to the center of the Batman?” Firefly wheezed, and Dick threw a birdarang at him. 

The next charge came from the old factory building across from them, and the force was enough to send both Bruce and Dick sprawling, tumbling across the concrete in a slowly-forming ring of fire that threatened to trap them between the stinking waters of Gotham harbor and a wall of chemical immolation, and it wasn’t entirely clear which one would be more unpleasant in the long run-- the harbor was plenty survivable, sure, but Bruce wasn’t feeling particularly inclined to growing extra fingers from the God-knows-what that dumped into sea there-- leaving them wedged between the elements with their exits swiftly closing out. 

“Nightwing!” he barked, watching with no small amount of relief as Dick hauled himself back up onto his feet, “head for the harbor!”

“What about Firefly? Can his suit withstand this kind of heat?”

“Lynns is a lot of things, but suicidal isn’t one of them. He’ll manage.”

“Copy that.”

It would have been a solid idea were it not for the line of oil that sparked across the water’s surface with the next charge that blew apart the waterfront, arcing across the black froth and filth in a semicircle of _unfortunate_ and cutting them off at the knees. 

“Damn! I think I see a point we can grapple out, B, at your 3-o’clock--”

Bruce didn’t much believe in gut ‘feelings’, but he knew the brain’s inherent process of pattern recognition and anticipation, and he knew his own pattern recognition was nothing short of exceptional, considering he’d conditioned it that way, so when his gut told him the next charge was going to go off, he trusted in it, because the risk of being right and silent was inconceivable. 

“ _Robin_!” 

He was entirely prepared for the full-body tackle, this once, as Dick moved without thinking, leaping for him despite the fact that he wasn’t Robin anymore, hadn’t been in years-- but some things were hard-coded, and one of those things was the knowledge that when Bruce called, he went, and when Dick jumped, Bruce would catch him-- throwing well-muscled arms around his neck, hitting the Batman like a freighter where he used to be a feather, curling his body up and against the broad, armored chest of the Batsuit with all the familiarity of someone who used to wear it. The charge went off as Bruce caught him with one arm around his waist, and the other swung his cape around them as he rolled with Dick’s momentum and took them both to the ground, folding himself into a shield of muscle and sinew and raw determination as the blast sent them both rolling across the pavement, the stink of burnt kevlar and Nomac in the air. Firefly started swearing, and Bruce knew that charge had been the last. 

For a single, heart-stopping moment, Dick didn’t move. Then, groaning around what was probably a few bruised ribs, he knocked his head against Bruce’s shoulder and smiled, scuffed and bloodied and with soot smeared across his face, a piece of stray hair sticking to Bruce’s sweat-soaked cheek where it peeked out from under the cowl. He found himself reminded of a little boy who used to break light fixtures and fall asleep curled up on his chest.

“If you wanted a hug, B, all you had to do was ask.”

And if anyone asked why he held onto his boy a little longer than was strictly necessary, he might have said something about the Fordst’s distant sons-- but Firefly’s jaw was going to be too tightly wired-shut to say anything about it, anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> hoho.. speaking of series.. this might also be a test drive 2 see how up to writing in succession i am.. maybe for a.. jason piece.. i am thinkink about..... tell me if u r interested and i may post som outlines..
> 
> also as always i read Every Single Comment and i love all of u who comment So Very Much even if i dont respond, i ABSOLUTELY hav read what u wrote AT LEAST four times. i lov u so much


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